“Saving Grace,” an entertaining, Caribbean-set murder mystery by Pamela Fagan Hutchins, does not read like a first novel.

That no doubt is why Hastings’ management contacted the writer this week to say that her book would be carried in all 140 stores.

Most readers will be happy to learn that Hutchins plans to use the same characters in a follow-up book and, in fact, a potential series.

Arriving at “Saving Grace,” however, would take Hutchins more than 40 years, as she turned to writing only as a second career.

The Houston-based writer will autograph copies of “Saving Grace” at 2 p.m. today at Hastings, 3249 50th St.

While her publicist said that she has strong ties to Lubbock, Hutchins explained that her earliest visits arrived when accompanying Amarillo High School’s sports teams to games in Lubbock.

She was a cheerleader for the Amarillo High Sandies.

“More than half of my friends attended Texas Tech,” Hutchins said, adding that she was “brainwashed” by her parents into attending Texas A&M University.

“In fact, I prepared paperwork to transfer to Tech my second year,” she said.

“But my parents said, ‘No way. You are staying right where you are.’ ”

An undergraduate degree as an Aggie led to law school at the University of Texas in Austin, and she then devoted more than a dozen years to being an employment attorney, human resources executive, investigator and business owner.

Her life began to change when she accepted an opportunity to live in the Virgin Islands for 10 years, working as an employment lawyer and investigator.

The islands were “25 percent Caucasian,” she said, and she felt her children could learn from that.

She also purchased “a huge monstrosity (house) that had a jumbie (spirit) living in it.”

Be aware that the house and the jumbie both eventually would appear when her primary character, a Dallas attorney named Katie, finds herself moving to the Caribbean in “Saving Grace.”

She also met a chemical engineer whom she would marry while living in St. Croix. But for family and business reasons, they eventually opted to move back to the United States and settle in Texas.

Her husband asked her what she wanted to do and, as much as she loved reading, she said she wanted to be a writer.

He encouraged her to make her own dreams come true.

For the next six years, she said, she did nothing but write, almost immediately winning regional writing contests.

She tried the traditional route, contacting publishing houses, listening to agents. But with the industry changing, she began working on her own distribution.

Then she met a Los Angeles editor whom she trusted. She pulled out the old stories “that my mom said were good.”

She did consistent, painful rewrites, asking for input “from writers who knew their stuff a lot better than me.”

And eventually, she found her way back to “Saving Grace,” which, she realized, is a perfect example of “write what you know.”

She basically took a Texas girl and placed her in “a magical environment.”

Hutchins had enjoyed reading mysteries for women, with legal thrillers a close second.

Writing at home, always while wearing “my pink flannel pajamas with the sheep on them,” she managed to combine both genres.

Hutchins makes it clear that she is not always fun to be around during the writing process. But her family knows that she will make it up to them when she reaches a stopping point.

And it’s usually at that point that her teenaged son has been known to ask if she’s ready to wash those PJs.